Doing Their Part
by SSTR87
Summary: The only good bug is a dead bug! Tune in to see how the Federation is developing new tactics to fight the bug threat! A man crosses his hands and calls out "Kage Bunshin", creating two copies of himself and charges an arachnid, stabbing it with a sword each. A giant toad fires a tongue out, latching onto several bugs eating them before vanishing. They're doing their part. Are you?


**Doing Their Part**

Naruto was sailing through the air. No he didn't develop some amazing ability to fly. Hell, even as the branches crashed around his head, he knew he wasn't leaping through trees.

No. He had been punted by his new sensei, Jiraiya of the Sannin. As he flew through the air, he wondered why the branches were no longer striking his face. He spun about in the air and looked around himself to see that he was starting to slow in his forward momentum and was now gaining speed in his descent.

"Holy crap, I'm gonna die!" he thought aloud, shouting his protests to the heavens.

"If you want to live, you need to summon the toads," he could hear Jiraiya instructing.

Naruto was at a complete loss. He had no idea what he was doing wrong in summoning the toads, but so far he had only managed to get tadpoles of varying stages. "I need more chakra!" he decided as he suddenly found himself within a large dank sewer, facing a giant set of bars holding back an equally large fox.

The fox grinned hatefully at the boy, its tone filled with malice and anger. **"What are you doing here, boy?"** it asked.

Naruto glared at the super-beast. "Since you're living in my body, I think it's high time that you paid rent! Now give me your Chakra, Demon!" he demanded.

The fox, seeming to be made of boiling water, bubbled up, sending some of its potent chakra into the boy. _**"I hope you know what you're doing, brat,"**_the beast thought to itself.

Naruto flashed his hands through the handsigns once again, and screamed loudly, **"Kuchiyose no Jutsu!"** just before he vanished.

Jiraiya stared at the location Naruto was moments ago. "B-But... he had done everything exactly right! Why was he reverse summoned?" he asked no one. Performing the summoning technique himself, the older ninja with white hair found himself face to face with an elder frog.

"Fukusaku-sama, can you tell me what the heck just happened to Naruto?"

"Jiraiya-boy, you summoned me to find some random kid?" he asked.

Jiraiya shook his head fervently. "No no! I just had Naruto sign the Toad contract and he was about to summon something big, when he just .. _vanished_," he offered.

The elder toad stroked his beard. "Sounds like a reverse-summoning to me," he offered before leaving in a puff of white smoke.

Jiraiya glared at the space the elder once was. "I already knew that much!" he thundered as he went about retracing everything that led up to Naruto's vanishing. "I can't tell the Hokage that I lost the brat!" he said in a panic.

An ANBU that had been watching Naruto started to leave to inform the current Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, about what was going on. As he spun around he was faced with the same white-haired man he was spying on. "J-Jiraiya-sama?" he asked incredulously.

"I can't let you make that report. At least not while I'm still in the village."

The ANBU never saw it coming as he was given a sneak peek edition of the newest Icha Icha book, making the ninja giggle like a schoolgirl before opening the cover and summarily the first page.

Jiraiya vanished in a leaf shunshin.

**Chapter 1: The Gathering**

A young man, at the age of 18 was currently playing wide receiver for his school's Arena Football team. His team, The Tigers were playing against the visiting team The Sharks. "HUT!" came the shout of the quarterback, a young fiery redhead that caught the snapped metallic ball and pulled backwards with it firmly tucked. She was one of the very few females to play the sport, and while she was as rough and tumble as the guys, she still retained her feminine charms.

Rico, mesmerized by the crowd as he spotted his girlfriend, Carmen, up in the stands, holding a banner, missed the ball that was tossed to his chest. "Hey Rico! Get your damn head in the game! You're letting us down!" thundered the team's quarterback, Dizzy Florez.

Just as Rico started to say something, he suddenly opened his eyes and woke up. He was sitting on a dropship, a ship designed to be dropped from the atmosphere onto bug-infested planets. He was all geared up, wearing a body-hugging bullet-proof suit with a bucket-like helmet. The suit had specially-made armor that flexed and folded with all abdominal movement, strong shoulder pads and a high neckline. The shirt worn under the armor was made of nanotech that appeared to be cloth, yet proved to be as resilient as any other armor used in the field against the bugs – that being not-at-all. The pants were made of interlocking plates of durasteel with reactive armor alongside the same nanotech in the knees and hips. The boots worn on the feet of Rico sealed tightly onto the pants, looking to be traditional combat boots.

"Wake the fuck up, Rico! Where's your damn head at?" Dizzy demanded, elbowing the young twenty-something man. Rico snapped to, waking from his memories of home. "Yeah, yeah... I'm awake. We gonna hit the ground yet? I'm itching for some combat!" Rico noted.

You may wonder just what is so special about a bug-infested planet that would require a man to be dropped, much less a full squad of soldiers armed to the teeth with rifles, machine guns, combat knives, power armor, and more grenades than can be counted. Well, you see the bugs they were dealing with were a little different than the usual.

"_I always get shaky when I'm about to head into battle,"_ he recalled saying to his diary. _"The doc took a look at me. He said, 'it wasn't fear'... I could've told him that."_

The drop ship rocked hard, violently rattling the frame and the soldiers within. A few of the greener soldiers suffered injuries, trying to tense their bodies. "ALRIGHT ROUGHNECKS! WHO'S READY TO DIE?!" Dizzy called out to her soldiers. All the men and women began to grunt and bark in reply.

"GET YOUR GUNS AND LET'S GO TO WAR!" Rico commanded. Being the commanding officer of the troopers required he add in some of his own words. Remembering the statement his former teacher in school and also his first commanding officer, Rasczak, would say. Rico did a damn-good impression of the one-armed soldier. "C'MON YOU APES, YOU WANNA LIVE FOREVER?!"

"**HELL NO! HOOAH!"** came the reply of all the soldiers as they got to their feet and charged out the opening door.

Immediately the air was assailed with the ringing of automatic gunfire.

**BRAKAKAKAKAKAK! BBRRRTTTT! PA! PA!**

Rico, heedless of the soldiers in his company led the way out the door, bringing his automatic rifle to bear.

"AHH! AAAHHHHHH!" came the screams of a dying man from just up ahead.

Rico was still unable to make eye contact with anything, but wasn't going to allow his guard to drop for even a second.

"FALLBACK! FALLBACK!" came a scared shout of a young woman, trying desperately to keep her soldiers alive.

Col. Rico waved his arm towards the retreating soldiers, his rifle at the ready to be fired. "Sargent! What's the situation? Why are you pulling back?" he demanded, yelling over the hail of gunfire from her soldiers still rounding the corner.

Rico grabbed the woman by her collar and shook her as she refused to speak. "Dammit! Answer me or I'll shoot your ass right here," he demanded, swinging his assault rifle to sit in her face.

The Sgt's eyes widened, as if just noticing the man before her. "R-Roughnecks?" she asked in confusion. "You guys are famous!" she noted, still not answering any of the questions.

**SSSKKKREEEEEEE! SSSKKKRREEEEEEEEE SSSSKKKKRRREEEEE!**

"Colonel! We got Arachniiiiiids!" shouted Dizzy. Her rifle let off a steady burst of rounds, sending red-hot slugs of steel through the air.

The so-called arachnids rounded the corner, scurrying between large freight boxes. The arachnids looked like giant mosquitoes without wings, only instead of a tube for sucking blood the bugs had a single mandible. The lower jaw acted like a sword, slicing upwards and through anything that the ten-foot tall monsters wanted. The arachnids ran on four legs and held a pair up in the air to smash down on the soldiers as they fled, piercing right through the armor as if it were never there.

As the first twenty arachnids made it around the corner, screeching loudly as they came, the Roughnecks opened fire. The blasts rang out just as loud as the Arachnids' screeching.

"BEAT 'EM BACK! Don't let up," Rico called out as he dropped a cartridge of ammo and began to fire again. Rico's shots ran true, punching giant gaping holes into the nearest arachnid spraying its steaming green blood everywhere. Even when it fell, Rico continued to fire until the head fell in half.

He turned onto the next bug, crossing fire with Dizzy as they lit up another arachnid, carving its head in half. "Good shootin', Colonel! Maybe you can try firing at me later on, Rico?" Dizzy offered, swinging her ass at Col. Johnny Rico in a teasing manner.

"Right, like I'd ever measure up to your expectations, Dizzy," he called out to the redhead as he turned to cover his squad's backside. It was a good thing he happened to turn as he saw a swarm of flying bugs moving in like a plague of locust. "We got flyers on our six!" he shouted as he opened fire, releasing twenty rounds at a time, interspersed with a surface to air grenade.

"Eat this, you fuckin' bugs!" Rico shouted, watching as the grenade blew a good dozen to bits before the gap was filled back in. His bullets seemed to damage several wings as he watched many falling from the sky only to land hard, get back to their feet and scurry on the ground.

"Dammit! We're not putting a dent in this lineup, sir!" shouted one of the soldiers, a tall black man with a scar running down the right side of his face, wearing an eyepatch on the same side..

"Jamal, I don't wanna hear that shit! We got ammo and guns, keep shootin! KILL 'EM ALL!" Rico cried out.

"**KILL EM ALL! HOOAH!"** came the unified retort of all the Roughnecks alongside the soldiers being _saved_.

Jamal kept squeezing his trigger even after he dumped his last cartridge. With a pump, he readied his chamber for the opportunity to fire a grenade. "GRENADE!" he called out as he let loose the blast. It was the last one he had, but he knew he had to use it or die holding on to it.

Just as the blast left the chamber, Jamal's eyes widened as he vanished.

Rico, out of the corner of his eye, saw a bright white flash and a plume of white smoke as Jamal vanished. An instant later, a young boy, possibly 12 or 13 with strong Asian background was in their midst. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and a blue headband with a symbol of a leaf with a swirling pattern in the center.

"What the hell?" Rico shouted, rounding on the boy. "Who are you? How'd you get here and where the hell's Jamal?" Colonel Rico demanded, his back to the boy as he continued firing his rifle into the swarm of flyers and arachnids.

Naruto's eyes bulged out of his head as he looked around himself, completely surrounded by bugs on all sides. The thunderous roaring of the rifles and handguns nearly caused the blonde to go deaf. He could feel something wet leaking from his ears and went to wipe them, only to pull back two hands covered in blood.

"Kuso! Where the hell am I? Did I die?" he asked.

While his exterior ears couldn't hear anything but the blasts of the loud guns, Naruto heard the voice of the Kyuubi sealed within his stomach. **"You're definitely not dead, brat... But that might be speaking too early..."** the Kyuubi offered, annoyed that the kid was still alive but in a far worse position.

Naruto nodded and pulled a kunai out from his holster and charged forward as he crossed his hands in a familiar handseal. "**Tajuu Kage Bunshin no Jutsu! (Mass Shadow Clone Technique)**" he cried out as the area was quickly filled to the brim with copies of himself.

Rico's eyes widened in amazement as the blonde boy somehow created his own clones in an instant. "That's... That's amazing," he thought to himself, turning back to gunning down the flyers. "Roughnecks take aim at the flyers, let the boy handle the arachnids!" Rico ordered.

Receiving several grunts in reply, Rico's shots were met and matched by a dozen new muzzles.

Naruto, for his part was actually fairing quite well. While the arachnids were massive and swarmed soldiers by their numbers and resiliency to gunfire of small caliber rounds, the blonde could create just as many clones if not more so, and armed with a kunai each, the ranks of blonde shinobi were decimating the encroaching army.

"Take this and this and this and this and this and this!" Naruto cried out as he and four clones took turns slicing into the yellow and black patterned carapace of an arachnid. "Yosha! I'm so totally awesome!" shouted one of the Narutoes just as an arachnid came from behind and ripped him in half.

The Naruto bursts into a plume of white smoke, leaving nothing behind for the insect to bite into. The creature stood still, staring at the vacated space or a long moment before proceeding forward to attack the next.

Naruto grumbled to himself as he realized, that while fighting these creatures with Taijutsu was affective, if he had've learned at least one good offensive jutsu, he might be able to get rid of these things far easier.

It was as he thinking this thought that another swarm of arachnids came from another corner, each as fresh as could be. Naruto grumbled as he knew his chakra wouldn't last forever. "Kuso! I need some help!" he screamed out, though the Roughnecks couldn't hear him as he was half a block away.

"**Idiot, why don't you summon a toad?"** Kyuubi called out, before severing the mind-link.

Naruto patted his fist into his palm, shouting, "That's right!" He flashed his hands through the familiar motions he'd learned earlier from Jiraiya. "**Kuchiyose no Jutsu! (Summoning Technique)**" he called out as he dumped all of his remaining chakra into the summoning attempt. There was one thing on his mind that was different then all of his previous attempts, and that was having as many toads for backup as he could.

This small difference in thinking was the determining factor as a swarm of fifty giant battle toads, Gamabunta (the boss summon; a Toad that looks and acts the part of a yakuza boss) included. **"Whoa? What the hell's going on here? Where's Jiraiya?" **Gamabunta demanded, staring at his toads, each the size of himself, that being around 40 feet in height.

Naruto jumped up onto Gamabunta's head and placed himself on the toad's nose. "I need your help! I somehow summoned myself to here, and these bugs are going crazy!" he explained.

Gamabunta, seeming for the first time, realized that he was surrounded by hundreds of insects. With a grin resembling a cat left alone with a goldfish, Gamabunta turned to the other battle toads. **"Grubs up, boys! Save some for Ma! She'd love to cook up a good stew with these ingredients,"** he ordered, firing out out his tongue and snatching three of the arachnids from the ground.

With feral grins all the battle toads went to town eating flyers and arachnids with wild abandon, cutting the numbers from the thousands to the hundreds. When all the battle toads were full, Gamabunta turned to Naruto with a large grin. **"Hey kid, normally I'd make some demands for sake or something equally as important, but since you fed me and my boys more than our fill, I'll let you off the hook. Now, where's Jiraiya? I wanna kick his ass for not giving me a cask of sake,"** the giant toad demanded.

Col. Rico looked at the impossibly large toad and the blonde boy on its nose seeming to have a conversation with some incredulity. "This kid might single-handedly turn the tides of this war!" he thought aloud. Dizzy could only nod dumbly as she and the rest of the squad alongside those rescued watched the exchange.

Naruto pressed his thumb to his chest as he looked cockily at the toad boss. "I summoned you! Am I awesome or what?" he shouted as the Naruto clones disbursed themselves as the remaining insect forces were being sealed in a giant toad scroll to be cooked up later.

Gamabunta glared at the boy. "**Don't get cocky kid! Next time you summon me you'd better have some good sake to offer me. Otherwise I ain't helping out at all," **Gamabunta threatened, not liking the kid's attitude.

Naruto looked at the toad like he was offended. "But, I thought you were my friend! You're supposed to help me in times of need!" he challenged.

Gamabunta let loose a thundering laugh that shook the ground and the containers around them. **"Kid, I don't have many friends, and you certainly ain't one of 'em! You want to be my friend you gotta earn it!"**

Naruto nodded. "Then I'll make you my friend, you big old cranky frog!" he challenged, earning a growl from the boss summon.

It was at that moment that a large blue plasma ball soared through the sky, racing through the air to slam into the gut of one of the toad summons, sending it reeling back to fall on its rear, a gaping hole in its chest. The toad summon had enough time to blink at the wound before it died.

Gamabunta, and Col Rico barked orders at the same time. **"Boys get ready for combat! Something big is heading this way!"** "Roughnecks, gather as much ammo as you can from the dead and let's get to work! We got at least one plasma bug closing fast! Where there's a plasma bug there's usually a tanker or two! Giant toads, blonde kid, don't get too close to it! Tankers spit fire and Plasma bugs, as you've just witnessed, can launch plasma-filled egg sacks past the speed of sound up to five galaxies away!" Rico ordered, not caring if the giant toad or the boy thought they were better than him.

Gamabunta glared at the human and pulled a giant katana from his sheathe, strapped to his back. **"I don't know who the hell you think you are, human, but if you try to order me around again, I'm gonna step on you!"** Gamabunta threatened.

Naruto glared at Gamabunta. "Hey, cranky! He's just trying to warn you! Now help me take care of these new monsters and I'll get you as much sake as you could ever handle!" Naruto demanded as he leaped down from the toad's nose.

Rico's eyes widened at the fall the boy was taking. He couldn't bring himself to say anything. His Roughnecks, while more vocal could only protest the boy's decision with grunts and inconsequential words.

Just as the blonde was about to ground, Dizzy screamed, "NOOOO!" and turned away, hoping to not be met with the splatter of a kid.

However, much to everyone's surprise, and relief, the boy wasn't dead. More so, the kid seemed perfectly fine as he ran up to the group, bent forward at the waist and arms trailing behind himself. "What's wrong? You all look like you've seen a ghost or something," Naruto asked, his eyes narrowing to slits in confusion as his face scrunched up.

Before any answers could be said the ground gave out below the troopers and Naruto, dumping them underground.

**End of Chapter**

**Okay so this is the first chapter of what could become a saga. I'm not sure I have the skills or the knowledge to write this one out completely. Anyone think I should continue or would you rather that I pass it on to another author to continue?**

**SSTR87**


End file.
